If you write a game in
Flash, you will have to accept
some performance limitations and make some compromises in terms of available technology
(eg. no Ageia
PhysX or hardware shaders for you). But nearly
everybody can play the game right in his browser, dramatically expanding the number of
people that see your game.

Now Microsoft is hurling a competitor to Flash at the market: Microsoft Silverlight. It is based on
the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 and WPF, which makes it about 1000 times more powerful
than Flash. WPF also includes 3D graphics and is way faster than flash, allowing for
full-screen animations where flash would slow down to a crawl. It’s being ported to
Mono/Linux as well, with the help if none other than Microsoft!

I’ve been fiddling around with font rendering again this weekend. For my upcoming game, I wanted
a cool intro effect like in some movies, where the displayed text is very very slowly expanding.
But I couldn’t quite replicate that effect with the XNA SpriteFont class. Even with
antialiasing turned on, the borders of the text were flickering. Using very large font sizes
resulted in hopelessly oversized .xnb files with only a slight improvement for
the unsteady borders.

So my new solution was to write a component that renders vector-based text instead of bitmaps.
Extracting the vector data from a font was a bit harder than I had expected because fonts
consist mostly of complicated second and third order bezier curves. I managed to break these
down into plain straight line segments and am now in the possession of a content pipeline
importer that converts .ttf fonts into arrays of line segments. Behold:

This article is outdated!
Instead of following the steps in this article, just download and
install the newer Visual C++ Express editions which already include
the Windows SDK (previously known as the Platform SDK).

This article will explain how you can install the freely available
Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition together with the Windows SDK required to
create Windows applications and use most of the code available on the ‘net.

If you’re interested in doing Windows game development in C++, Visual C++ 2005 Express
is a great choice because it combines a world class IDE with the optimizing version of
the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler. If you’re concerned with standards compliance, rest assured
that Microsoft’s compiler is among the best.

More Information

History Lesson: Microsoft and the C++ Standard

The idea that Microsoft compilers have poor standards compliance
is rooted in Visual C++ 6.0, which was shipped before the
C++ ’98 Standard had been completed but lived well into
the C++ ’98 era. Visual C++ 2005 doesn’t have such
problems at all and is actually one of the best – if not the best –
compiler in terms of ISO/ANSI C++ standards compliance.
With Herb Sutter, Microsoft has also won a famous member of
the C++ standards committee for its own development team
(see ISO/ANSI
C++ Standards Committee Secretary Herb Sutter Joins Microsoft’s
Developer Division).

The only obstacle for game programmers is that the Express Edition
of Visual C++ 2005 doesn’t include the Platform SDK,
Microsoft’s collection of headers and libraries for windows development,
including the all-time famous Windows.h. This article
will guide you through the entire process of installing
Visual C++ 2005 Express, setting up the Platform SDK and configuring
your build environment.

A topic that pops up every now and then is how to use
XNA in a Windows.Forms application. This is rather difficult
because the GraphicsDeviceManager provided by Microsoft
creates its own window and will not cooperate with a normal
Windows.Forms window, thus forcing the developer to roll
his own GraphicsDevice initialization and
management code (which is quite a bit of work!)

As can be seen in one of my recent news posts, I did just
that while developing a world editor for my upcoming game
Island War. Because of the great demand for such a
component, I decided to release my XNA GameControl class
to the public. You can download it here:

How to use:

Add a reference to Nuclex.GameControl.dll (or
to the project if you integrated the project file into your
solution)

Create a new UserControl that inherits from
Nuclex.GameControl. You can do this by adding
a normal UserControl and replacing the
: UserControl by : Nuclex.GameControl
in the class definition.

Override the LoadGraphicsContent(),
UnloadGraphicsContent(), Update(),
Draw() and so on methods as usual.

There’s one issue: Because the working directory will be set to the
system’s temp folder when your control is shown in designer mode,
you will not be able to view your game in the
Visual Studio Forms Designer if it is loading content using the
XNA content pipeline (well, unless you want to copy your project’s
output folder into your temp directory whole). There will be no problems
starting or debugging the project, though.

I decided to put some work into creating an editor that I can
later use for building the levels and perhaps even include with my game.
XNA gave me a hard time getting it to work inside a Windows.Forms
application and I had to rewrite several of the XNA classes until I had
a properly working XNA UserControl allowing me to render my game world
inside the editor window.

Of course, the editor had to look modern and neat, with dockable panels
and color gradients all over the place. As it turned out, there is no
built-in solution for docking windows in the .NET Framework, so, given my
plans to release the game’s source code, I had to find a solution that was
both free and provided a decent user experience.

I know, as always, I’m a bit late with updates, but just in case you don’t know yet,
the Microsoft guys finally opened www.xna.com.
Finally, a complete website dedicated to XNA instead of the cramped MSDN section!

The developer area has been moved to
http://creators.xna.com, including a wealth
of tutorials and a revamped discussion area.

This weekend, I tried finally getting texture splatting to work for my Island War terrain
renderer… and failed miserably :D. Look for yourself:

There’s a lot of tuning to do until this crappy… something… looks like believable
terrain. I’m not aiming for photorealism, but I’m not settling for a surreal landscape
that stands out like a children’s painting would in an art gallery, either 🙂

Alright, my next game is finally on its way. The game’s working title
will be “Island War”, which describes the setting of this game pretty
well: small islands at war with each other.

And it won’t be like any other strategy title you might have played.
I’m planning to remove the tediousness from the RTS genre
by getting rid of micro management and unit placement.

I decided to try a different approach to the design of this game than I
did with Ball Race. Instead of creating several
GameComponents (like SceneGraph,
EffectManager and GameStateManager)
and spreading the game’s logic between them, I’ll try to model the
game world in an object model designed for convenient use, so I can
later set up my levels and launch the game with just a few lines of code.

The code so far incorporates an asset management system,
the entire world expressed in an object model with load/save capability
and can render dynamic height-mapped terrain allowing for real-time
terrain deformation by explosions and other influences. I haven’t
written the actual shaders yet, so this will look
much better once I can get the shaders going.

Originally, my plan was to put together a new release of Nuclex.Fonts this evening,
but there was a small hurricane in the area near the end of the week that uprooted lots of trees,
creating a great obstacle course in the local forests. My favorite jogging route was totally
buried. Well, I couldn’t help but go out there every day since the past week. Today, I took my
camera with me, here are some shots from the forest trail I used to jog on:

I haven’t had such an intense workout with so diversified movements (due to the constant
jumping and climbing) in a long time. Normally I can do the 10 km (~ 6.2 mi) in about
55 minutes (it’s rough terrain!). Now, after 55 minutes, I barely managed to pave my way
through about half of the trail. My heart rate often got close to 200 bpm, making it
quite difficult to jump from tree to tree. Here’s an image I tried to take of my watch’s
recording after the run:

If your game needs advanced GUI capabilities,
CeGui# might just hit the nail on
the head for you. Marketese aside, this is a seriously good GUI library with
Buttons, ListBoxes, Scrollbars, ProgressBars, Sliders, ComboBoxes and more.

Being a port of the well known
CeGui C++ library, it is not bound to
a single graphics API but can instead be easily extended to run on a multitude
of environments. Out of the box, it already provides extensions to be used with:
XNA Framework 1.0, Managed DirectX 1.0,
SDL.NET and
Tao.OpenGL.

The only real problem for XNA developers might be that it does not
yet work on the Xbox 360 due to several restrictions in the functionality
of the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 that XNA applications have to
build against on the Xbox 360.

Just in case you have never heard of this game, Sexy Beach 3 is an adult title sold
exclusively in Japan. In the game, you take the role of some random guy who gets invited
for a holiday on “Sexy Island”, a small vacation island populated with a handful
of other guests, which, by mere chance, are all good-looking women. You can probably see
where this is heading to now… 😀

Right, Sexy Beach 3 is basically just another sex simulation game, only that the Japanese
are miles and miles ahead of the stuff churned out by western development studios. The game
features beautiful anime girls, deforming clothing, real-time skin tanning and realistic
boob physics. Yes, really. Getting this game to install in Windows Vista is quite
a headache, so I took the liberty to write down exactly what I did to make it work in
a western Windows Vista system.